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Abundantia

Please add updates or make corrections to the NumisWiki text version as appropriate.ABVNDANTIA Abundance: Plenty.- This allegorical divinity had neither temples nor altars erected to her honour; but she appears on several medals and monuments of the Romans.

On these, whether represented by herself, or as personifying the liberality of the Emperor or Empress, she figures as a handsome woman, clothed in the stola, holding a cornucopiae, the mouth of which she holds towards the ground, and lets the contents fall in seemingly careless profusion. In his illustration " of Roman medals by the ancient Poets," Addision says, "You see Abundance or Plenty makes the same figure in medals as in Horace.

Spanheim, in his translation of the Caesars of Julian, ascribes a silver coin, exhibiting ABVNDANTIA AVG and a woman pouring money out of a horn of plenty, to Severus Alexander. And he goes on to observe, that "it serves to mark, amongst several others, the liberality exercised by that excellent Emperor towards his soldiers and subjects, in his distribution to them of portions of the Aerarium publicum, or public treasure. Neither in Eckhel, nor in Mionnet, however, do we find an Abundantia of Severus Alexander; but both these authorities, together with Akerman, describe a similar reverse, on a silver coin of Julia Mamaea, the mother of Alexander, an ambitious woman, to whose avarice and intermeddling disposition he owed that unpopularity with the army which proved fatal to them both.